3D Freebie: Microsoft’s Kinect Fusion turns Xbox controller into a 3D scanner

For those equipped with a Kinects sensor and some programming chops, Microsoft has opened the opportunity to turn the consumer level game controller into a low-cost hand-held 3D scanner. The company’s recently released Kinect for Windows SDK 1.7 which includes Kinect Fusion, software tool that merges multiple snapshots from a Kinect sensor to create dense 3D models of people and objects in real time.

To generate a model, a Kinect is moved around the object to be scanned while the sensor continuously tracks the 6 degrees-of-freedom pose of the camera and fuses multiple depth maps of the scene into a surface-based mesh, that can be saved as an .obj or .stl file. To get the real time scan, though, the sensor relies heavily on the computer’s GPU and NVIDIA’s CUDA language for depth map conversion, camera tracking, volumetric surface generation and ray casting.

Download the SDK on the Kinect for Windows website.